“That one can convince one’s opponents with printed reasons, I have not believed since the year 1764. It is not for that purpose that I have taken up my pen, but rather merely to annoy them, and to give strength and courage to those on our side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.”
G.C. Lichtenberg (1742 – 1799), courtesy of 'Deogolwulf'

Saturday, 15 March 2014

Tony Benn: Good riddance of bad (political) rubbish #2

The 'Grim Reaper' seems to be working overtime this week. First, the politically malevolent Bob Crowe (see two posts below) and then the equally malevolent Anthony Wedgood Benn, 2nd Viscount Stansgate, despite his pathetic efforts to drop the title and pretend to be a 'horny-handed pleb'. I repeat my careful words to the effect that my commentary on the man is confined to his political activities. In Benn's case, I don't remember hearing even a whisper of personal scandal during his life and he appears to have been a genuinely loving father and husband and for that he deserves praise. However, that does not excuse him from being buried under a ton of rotten veg for the fact that the vast majority of his political activities show him to have been an A1, dim-witted plonker of the first water!

One might be forgiven for spouting the virtues of state-controlled socialism up to the age of, say, nine - oh, alright then, say, twenty nine - but then you really are expected to grow up and see the world as it is, not as you fervently wish it to be. In Benn's case, of course, he never grew up and it is an irony of truly mouth-watering deliciousness that the cause of his perpetual infancy was the thing against which he spent his life railing - a privileged background! His family was wealthy but being a product of 19th century wealth-creation it was shot through with nonconformist religiosity which Benn lapped up at his mother's knee. Of course, in retrospect, it is easy to see that he should have gone into the church where he would undoubtedly have risen to be yet another of those totally useless Archbishops of Canterbury whose feeble bleatings merely indicate that their intellectual aspirations are a lot nearer to a mythical heaven than they are to an all too real world.

So farewell, then, Anthony Wedgwood Benn, and I hope you will not mind me thinking of your political career, in which you failed to become prime minister, as being similar to one of those monstrous lumps of cosmic detritus that occasionally pass close to earth and which, when they miss, cause me to wipe my brow and think, perhaps there is a God!

NOTE: Yes, I'm back and once again you can expect the usual outpourings of .................... (Fill in as required)

Comments

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I thought he was a gigantic political turd! Everyone (the BBC) says he was a great parliamentarian. But if the establishment of a socialist state had required abolishing parliament, he would have led the charge.

On programmes like Any Questions, his tactic was to gabble at high speed so that you couldn't pick out the lies and half truths.